An ongoing trend in the telecommunication industry is to “move network functions into the cloud”, meaning that instead of using dedicated and specialized (but expensive) processing hardware, to run the corresponding network functions in generic data centers comprising bulks of general purpose (but cheap) processing hardware. These data centers may even be owned and operated by a different company and the processing power would be rented dynamically, depending on the need and the price.
With the ever increasing processing power of computing hardware, it also becomes possible to use the spare resources of network nodes to act as platform for hosting more/other network functions. In this scenario the network node would also act as a mini-datacenter.
The ETSI standardization forum has recognized this trend to virtualize network functions and is standardizing an architectural framework for network function virtualization (NFV), see ETSI GS NFV002 V1.2.1, and FIG. 1. Network Functions Virtualization envisages the implementation of network functions as software-only entities that run on the NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) 130. As such, four main domains are identified in FIG. 1:                Virtualized Network Functions (VNF) 100, as the software implementation of a network function which is capable of running on the NFVI.        NFV Infrastructure (NFVI) 130, including the diversity of physical resources and how these can be virtualized. NFVI supports the execution of the VNFs. The NFVI 130 comprises hardware resources 140, which are abstracted by a Virtualization Layer 150. The NFVI 130 offers Virtual Compute 160, Virtual Storage 170, and Virtual Network 180 resources to the VNFs 110 hosted by the NFVI 130.        NFV Management 120, which covers the orchestration and management of physical and/or software resources (via a NFVI Manager 190), that support the infrastructure virtualization, and the lifecycle management of VNFs. NFV Management focuses on all virtualization-specific management tasks necessary in the NFV framework.        NFVI Manager 190, which covers the orchestration, management, and lifecycle management of physical and/or software resources that support the infrastructure virtualization.        
The NFV framework enables dynamic instantiation and management of VNF instances and the relationships between them regarding data, control, management, dependencies and other attributes.
When combining the concepts of network function virtualization with the concept of using network nodes as platform for hosting such virtualized network functions, the network node platform would be used as NFVI 130 and a VNF Manager 120 would dynamically deploy VNFs 110 onto the NFVI 130.
The network nodes used as a host for VNFs may be the powerful server nodes controlling the communication networks. Since these powerful servers are typically very few and located centrally, there is not much difference over using central data centers. An alternative approach is to utilize those network nodes that are widely geographically distributed and where the sheer number of nodes in the network offers a huge collective processing power. The use of radio access network nodes such as radio base stations (e.g. NodeB, eNodeB, RBS, BTS) are a promising candidate. The prime advantage of utilizing radio base stations would be that the NFV can be located very close to the subscriber, and by that minimize latency and reduce network based transmission bandwidth.
Latency is in particular an issue for specific types of sensors of machine-to-machine (M2M) communication and machine type communication (MTC). In order to keep MTC devices simple and cheap, but also in order to save battery power in autarkic MTC devices, any processing needed for MTC is off-loaded into the network. However, some of the processing off-loaded into the network is time critical, e.g. reaction on certain sensor measurements. For these applications it is critical to have the processing as close as possible to the MTC device.
Consequently, it is unclear how to utilize the NFVI provided by radio base stations in an efficient way.